Skilled software developers can learn a new language quickly, even if they haven’t specifically trained for that skill, because in the real world, you end up dealing with so many different languages; for example, as a C#/Java developer, you’ve probably also had to work with SQL, either bash or PowerShell, can’t really avoid JavaScript, and likely had to work with Python.
This kind of generalization may seem obvious to someone with decades of experience, but it isn’t to the college students I teach who are just starting out in the field of software development, and it may not be obvious to someone with only a few years of experience who thinks they’re pretty good at what they do (when I think back to when I only had ten years of real-world experience, I realize how much I still had to learn to become the person I am today; I’m grateful I worked with people who helped
Using integrated development environments (IDEs) to avoid command lines, object relationship modeling (ORM) technology and domain specific language (DSL) compilers to avoid learning about SQL or other languages, they glom onto whatever ridiculous interop mechanism they can that prevents them from learning about low-level languages… and I think it really does hurt them, and I remember running into some software developers who did so well that they never managed to get to the right generalizability (which is, when I get hired to teach courses, what I try to accelerate: Comparative Machine Language Morphology ;P).
Not only are we going to end up interacting with a number of people who actually do find learning interesting because we are all living in the Eternal September, but I was recently surprised to learn how many CS students there are at most of the other Universities (it turns out the one I still live at is an extreme minority with only a few percent of the population being Computer Science and only half of the students being engineering at all).
